Empty Homes, Homeless People: The Politics of Vacant Housing in the United States.
By Nora Carrier
Abstract
The United States is facing a housing affordability crisis. Housing costs continue to rise, outpacing both inflation and wage growth.1 In December of 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that over forty percent of American renter households--over nineteen million households--were rent-burdened, meaning they spent over thirty percent of their income on rent.2 Harvard University’s State of the Nation’s Housing report estimated that thirty percent of all households--including those who own their own homes--spend more than thirty percent of their income on rent or mortgage payments.3 In such a broadly unaffordable housing market, it becomes pertinent to analyze where homes are being left empty. Vacant and underutilized housing is a perplexing problem that underscores the pitfalls of the commodification of housing. The number of vacant housing units in the United States far exceeds the homeless population, according to data collected by the US Postal Service in partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.4 In response to this paradox, housing reclamation movements have sprung up across the country, practicing a highly politicized form of squatting. My thesis asks: what are the causes of vacant housing in the United States, what can municipalities and state governments do to more efficiently utilize their housing supplies, and what activist work is being done in response to vacant housing? Ultimately, I argue that vacant housing exists in the United States as a result of the hyper-commodification of housing. The relationship between housing commodification and vacant housing manifests itself in a two-tiered process: in low-income areas, homes are abandoned because their owners are unable to extract monetary value from them in the private housing market, and in high-cost cities, out-of-town real estate investors purchase homes for investment purposes and do not live in them. These two processes have disparate impacts on surrounding communities: in low-income areas, vacant and abandoned properties create blight and encourage further disinvestment, while in high-cost cities, out-of-town home purchases exacerbate cities’ existing affordability crises as empty condominiums eliminate the use of crucial housing resources. Government redresses to vacant housing must be different in different areas because of this, however, policy choices that aim to remedy the prevalence of housing vacancies in both contexts contribute to the partial decommodification of housing. Finally, housing takeovers and political squatting in low-income communities raise the fundamental contradiction between homelessness and vacant housing and disrupt our profit-based housing system, further promoting the decommodification of housing.

Japanese Reproductive Health: Space and Opportunity for Reproductive Health Talk and the Role of Women's Colleges
Student name: Yui Sakai
Project advisor: Jacquelyne Luce and Corey Flanders
This project examines Japanese college student’s experiences with reproductive health care and information access in Japan. I engage with participants’ stories to understand the complexity of the issues around sexual and reproductive health rights in Japan, identify the barriers to accessing care and knowledge, and learn how they overcome the barriers with constraints. Each participant offers their perspectives on reproductive health and experience as a person who lives in Japan, who attends a women’s college, and who is in their early 20s in this project. I use feminist methodological approach, Interpretive Phenomenological Approach, and Foucault’s theoretical framework of Biopower/Biopolitics to analyze and deeply engage with the participant’s embodied knowledge. With an interdisciplinary approach, I focus on the participant’s own interpretation of their experiences and of the world they live in. Additionally, I interpret what participants are noticing about how complex social structures, norms, policies, and interpersonal-relationships intersect with women’s experiences with reproductive health care in Japan. Participants shared their stories within the category of visible, invisible, and shapeshifting reproductive health topics. Visible topics are the focus of society for resolution as well as a heightened focus of gender discrimination. On the other hand, invisible topics are not often talked about in public spaces and women’s embodied experiences are kept silent as they are sources of stigma, discomfort, and discrimination. Lastly, shapeshifting topics can appear or disappear in certain spaces and in contexts. Through this project, it is identified that Japanese women, who are mainly the center of the reproductive health discourse, are not noticing themselves as articulating their thoughts within the framework of reproductive health. With social norms, stigmas, and political ideologies that often discourage women from having conversations around their bodies and health, I suggest that women’s colleges have the possibilities as a space for women to feel empowered, build self-efficacy and self-affirmation, gain knowledge and skills to confidently exchange their thoughts and experiences with reproductive health in Japan, which then leads to the promotion of reproductive health care and information access.

Being Realistic About Reducing Incarceration: What Works and What Doesn't in Purple States
Student name: Avni Wadhwani
Project advisor: Preston Smith
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness took the criminal justice space by storm. Published in 2010 just as states began reversing War on Drugs policies, the book transformed the way activists and policymakers think about prison and the state’s role in incarceration. The book’s core premise posited that incarceration’s purpose is to systematically and purposefully disenfranchise African American men.
My research draws on interviews with state policymakers and activists to argue that emphasizing race in political messaging about criminal justice reform is not the most effective approach to getting criminal justice reform passed at the state level in purple states.1 By political messaging, I mean the way legislators, the governor, and activists describe proposed legislation to the public, their constituents, and other policymakers. My research aims to answer the questions: Under which conditions do which approaches to criminal justice reform advocacy work better politically, and under which conditions are certain approaches not as effective or even antithetical to productive policy conversations? Beyond messaging, do these approaches result in policy changes that significantly reduce mass incarceration? Using Michigan as a case study, I find that, given purple states’ frequent conservative majority in the state legislature in addition to their large predominantly white, non-urban populations, the most politically efficacious approach to reform legislation is an economic approach.
This economic approach aims to ameliorate the effects of the carceral system, both by making it easier for offenders to access socioeconomic resources after incarceration and through preventative but piecemeal measures before incarceration, such as increasing funding for an individual program or resource. These resources include but are not limited to the ability to be gainfully employed and access adequate housing. Messaging for this approach emphasizes job creation, becoming a productive member of society/one’s community, increasing the state’s economic revenue, or other related terms.
This research challenges the existing literature and establishes a political framework for bipartisan consensus on carceral reform. It examines the benefits and limitations that accompany the economic approach and other approaches to carceral reform.
1 A purple state is a state with roughly equal Republican and Democrat members in the state assembly, or one where party control of a state legislature flips frequently.

Sophie Soloway - Senior Symposium Abstract
Low-power FM radio stations allow organizations broadcast at interval frequencies between those occupied by commercial radio stations. In 2000, the FCC ruled to grant liscences to select community radio stations across the country to broadcast on these airwaves. Given current crises of media conglomeration and a history of political activism from these low-wattage stations, it is imperative to continually understand how these stations function in an ever-changing media landscape. This case-study contains interviews with eight individuals who volunteer as programmers at a single LPFM station aimed at better understanding how contemporary community radio functions. The findings suggest that though participants pride themselves on their independence from the broader radio field, innovations in streaming and volunteer-based political economies in some ways limit LPFM’s ability to distinguish itself from commercial constraints. However, despite the changes occurring for programmers, audience engagement and advocacy-based programming are still highly prioritized in unique ways.